Since my last update on the church in Brentwood, things are moving on. I will assume the reader is familiar with the material in two previous reports mentioned on this blog. We left the saga at the point where Nigel Davies, the campaigner and blog master received the silent treatment at the hands of the Trustees of the church on the 6th December during a meeting when he presented about past abuses at the church. This looked like a action calculated to intimidate Nigel, by not allowing any of the Trustees to speak to him or ask questions.

The latest reports from the church show that the intervention of the Evangelical Alliance in the person of its director, Steve Clifford, has created a momentum of its own. After the Trustees’ meeting on the 6th December with Nigel, another meeting took place between two trustees and Steve Clifford four days later. Nigel had an email about this latter meeting and the first impression was that Steve was allowing the church to run its own investigation, free of any external supervision by the Evangelical Alliance. On Tuesday 16th, a fuller picture began to emerge. The proposal was that there should be a Commission set up to examine the wrongs of the past. This will still be internal but would have an independent chairman recommended by the EA.

The length of the statement on Tuesday and the mention of corrupt leadership makes it look like the Trustees are at last beginning to recognise the nature of the cultic culture that has been the mark of their church for decades. They appear to understand far more of the past problems by using expressions like ‘wrong culture’, ‘past wrongs’ and ‘errors of the past’. They have even spoken of ‘toxic behaviour polluting the church.’ The Bible is referred to and in particular the passage from Mark 9.35, ‘Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else’. The whole statement still implies that the ‘wrong culture’ is the fault of Michael Reid,(illustrated above) but there is a recognition that his influence is felt in the church today. One of the interesting passages concerns the recognition of the fact that it has taken six years to come to the point where they feel the need to ‘analyse our culture’ . They talk about shock, anger and hurt but they do not really offer any insight into the defensive nature of the church over all those six years and their reluctance to seek out the many hurt victims of the church. It is they on whose behalf Nigel has been so tirelessly campaigning.

Before setting out on Tuesday for an appointment, I rattled off a quick response to this lengthy piece on Nigel’s blog. I mentioned one issue that concerns all the survivors of Peniel and Trinity, the issue of finance. The abuse of cultic leaders, like Michael Reid abuse is played out in one or more of three ways. One is the enjoyment of power for itself, as a way of feeding the leader’s narcissism. The second is the exploitation of sexual favours from congregants. This needs no further comment and was in fact the actual cause of Reid’s downfall. The third is the use of the church’s funds for the benefit of the leaders. The history of this church has been marked by financial irregularities, not least the extensive selling of insurance policies to members. This was alongside an insistence that everyone should pay a tithe to the church. Over the years this has allowed a number of questionable and secretive financial transactions to be made, in one case drawing on £500,000 of church money to allow Peter Linnecar to avoid bankruptcy. Also the various properties appear to have been registered in the names of the leaders so that the church found itself, on at least one occasion, buying a property twice. It would seem that whatever the truth or otherwise of these rumours, the church needs to be investigated thoroughly in this whole area of finance. Recently former members were writing in to the blog with estimates of how much they had given to the church while they had been members. The sums involved came to a half million in one case. Clearly there have been large sums of money floating around and there needs to be a complete forensic look at the finances of the church if there is to be a real attempt at openness and transparency about the past.

Nigel’s blog comment which accompanied his reproducing the new Trustees statement on Tuesday, did touch on the financial question. He also raised the issue on everyone’s mind as to how Peter L can remain pastor of the church when such strong statements have been made about the dysfunctional past of the church and in which Peter played a full part. We await to see whether the indirect but strong criticism of his identification with the ‘wrong culture’ can be ignored. It is significant that a meeting could be held by two Trustees with Steve Clifford and make concrete proposals about a Commission without, apparently, consulting the other Trustees and the leadership. Such independent functioning would never have been allowed in Michael Reid’s time and one expected it would not be tolerated under the present regime – until the present crisis!

Stop Press. A further testimony from a Bible Student indicating how constant bullying over weight from the Peniel leadership led to an eating disorder. It is a powerful testimony, not only because it is well written but also because it names two individuals, Carolyn Linnecar and Meidre Cleminson who are both still very much around in the leadership. This naming of current officials means that it is hard to see how the Commission will be able to avoid recommending that there should be a complete ‘clear-out’ at the top, including Carolyn’s husband, Peter.

The discussion about binary thinking, right-wrong, black-white, clean-unclean, has led me to thinking about the prejudices that infect our society. The oldest prejudice was to hate the person not in your tribe, as alien and a presumed enemy. Over the years, as people learnt to live in social groups larger than one’s blood relatives, so the objects of emnity shifted. Enmity was felt towards anyone who was ‘different’, whether because of language, colour or simply being a stranger. It is possible to trace this instinctive hostility to the stranger to a need for self-preservation, a protection from the unknown and potentially dangerous. But over the centuries we have begun to learn to see the one who is different from us as offering us the possibility of learning something new. In short, most of us most of the time have grown up away from the kind of response that makes everyone either a friend or an enemy.

In the past few days in the UK, politicians of different parties have been caught in unguarded moments of expressing comments which reveal a deep homophobic or racial bias. In short they have been shown to be still mired in the old thought patterns which have become, not only politically incorrect, but also, in some cases, against the law. One suspects that many other people, apart from politicians, are still trapped in a world-view that can only distinguish between an us and them, friend or enemy. Social expedience and tact may reduce the times when this kind of prejudice is in fact uttered, but it still seems to exist just below the surface.

Let us think about what are the reasons why many people sometimes regress into what might be described as a primitive tribal way of thinking. The first reason is one we have already discussed – the capacity of the stranger to make us feel threatened and unsafe. That feeling may be traceable to experiences in childhood or to some deeper unconscious process. This desire for safety, as we all know, is not just a concern for our physical well-being; it also extends to feeling safe in our social environment. I am here referring to the unique ways in which each of us navigate through life, learning what has to be done to enable us to feel we belong and avoid those actions which can cause us to experience ‘social death’. This power to keep us conforming strongly in the social areas of life is often rooted in a real fear of being ‘left out’. It is likely to act more strongly on the young than the older population, the former feeling more acutely their social vulnerability. How do I keep my head above water, my acceptability intact and avoid all the social slip-ups that I am in danger of committing? The easiest answer to this dilemma is to ‘follow the crowd’. It may involve following an individual, whether a fashion guru or charismatic leader; it may involve joining a particular church. Each one of these can offer a haven to keep us ‘safe’, free to exist without falling in one of the many traps that spell, at best, ridicule and at worst, ostracism from the tribe that we want to be identified with, our gang or favoured group. The problem is that once we start to belong, we find that we take on the pattern of thinking that belongs to the particular group. That, after all, is part of the conditions of membership.

I have said in previous posts that many people live with a measure of unacknowledged fear in their lives. In this post we have been touching on the fear of a social gaffe that may put a person outside their favoured ‘gang’ and this is not a trivial emotion. Older people, who have a life-time of experience in creating an identity, can forget how fragile identity is to a younger person. The places that offer a packaged form of identity to these young people, are going to be places that often deal in simplicities and clear rules. Keep these clear rules and follow the leader and you will be safe, safe from the fear of being outside and safe from not knowing who you really are. This identity and this belonging however come at a definite price. The ‘gang’ that offers membership has, of necessity, to deal in generalities. If you join us, you will take on the persona of the gang, whatever it is. It may be one who hates Communists, gay marriage and ascribes many actions that we disapprove of as coming from the devil or Satan. These are the sort of generalities that are sometimes thrust on new aspiring members of a church. Equivalent demands are made on those who join political parties. The objects of generalised hate are here members of other parties or particular groups in society, whether they be bankers or Trade Unionists.

This blog post is perhaps claiming that black-white thinking may be one of the prices we pay to belong to any group that appeals to us. The church, in this respect, is no different from any other group, in that it often demands that we adjust our thinking to run along certain particular tramlines. In making this statement, I am perhaps simultaneously accepting and criticising a way of thinking that exists widely across society. It is wrong to think ill of groups of people who do not deserve such prejudice. At the same time, would we wish everyone to abandon the groups and parties who provide belonging and safety to so many? Prejudice may in the final resort be part of the price we have to pay for people to feel connected. I do not know the answer to this paradox. Perhaps we need to imagine a better way for people to bond together, other than in sharing the same ‘tribal’ assumptions which, according to this blog, are harmful to those whom they touch.

One of the things that is becoming clear in the reporting of extremism across the world is that fanaticism and good education are not natural bedfellows. The Nigerian extremist group, Boko-Haram, places rejection of Western education at the heart of its reason for existence. Their name in fact is translated as ‘Western education is forbidden’ in the local language Hausa. Recently a Muslim woman, Runa Khan, who had advocated jihad in Britain and posted a number of inflammatory pictures on her facebook account, was sentenced to five years imprisonment. One interesting comment was made at her trial by her defence lawyer. He said that she was given to thinking only in a ‘binary’ manner. In short, for her, everything to do with the Muslim faith was good and everything else was evil and fit only for destruction.

These first two examples are taken from recent stories connected with Muslim extremism but the same ‘binary’ pattern of thinking is embedded among many Christians. Recently I had an email from one Jonny Scaramanga who runs a blog concerned with the scourge, as he sees it, of Accelerated Christian Education. This is a course of teaching which is used by some 30 ‘Christian’ schools and also is followed by home educating parents. Jonny referred me to a recent apologist of this system of education who had written in the Times Education Supplement. He asked me if would write a response. I dutifully wrote a reaction to the article, which may or may not appear in next week’s TES. The scheme for ACE is strongly flavoured with an American Right wing approach to life. It is strongly imbued with laissez-faire economics, right wing political views and above all it is profoundly conservative and reactionary in both theology and morality. It takes an strong anti-evolutionary position and follows the so-called ‘young earth’ theory which dates creation to around 4000 BC. The thing that, for me, really discredits it as a system of education, are not the wacky ideas that are presented as facts, but the method of presenting them. The whole pattern for ACE is the centrality of work-books. Filling these in systematically enables the child to learn approved facts on a variety of subjects. Each work book is completed when the child has ticked the right answer for each question that is asked. The implication is that there is only ever going to be one correct answer. In other words binary thinking, right-wrong, black-white ideas are THE way to think. When you see the actual ‘facts’ that are presented in these work-books, you realise that the child will never have a chance to sort out fact from opinion, bias from truth. I quote from my TES letter. ‘One way perhaps of teaching history from a ‘Christian perspective’ is to ignore totally every other point of view. One quote that will give the flavour of the way that Christian/Right Wing rhetoric is fed into the curriculum is as follows. “The United Nations was created by Communists and has always been used by Communists to further Communist goals… Satan is the real force behind man’s efforts to achieve world government.” To present any subject like this and suggest that there is only one correct understanding of history is a kind of anti-education.’

I realise reading this kind of indoctrination that I have been fortunate indeed to have had a good education that allows one to sift facts before arriving at a conclusion. The conclusions we individually have come to on the topic of politics, religion or even science are always going to have a certain provisionality. Life itself allows one to change and grow into new insights. What a terrifying thought it would be if everything about life could be translated into a ticked box in a workbook. But, sadly, a large of Christians live in this binary universe where everything is good or bad, true or false or evil or sacred. This way of binary thinking feeds into the way that Scripture is read. Every statement in the Bible is literally true, it is claimed, otherwise the whole of Scripture cannot be trusted to be the word of God. Chris illustrated for me the crazy lengths to which this kind of thinking can take one. An earnest Christian woman that he knew, claimed that, of course, dragons once existed. They are mentioned in the Book of Revelation! Somehow in this woman’s education, the notions of metaphor and poetry were never introduced. What an impoverished education she must have had, not to mention the ways in which her thinking was permanently in a state of fear and confusion, having to deal head-on with all the passages about God’s wrath and anger.

In drawing this blog post to some sort of conclusion, I have to declare my understanding of education. I believe that it is about the ability to understand and communicate with other peoples, cultures and languages across the centuries. This requires the gifts of imagination, empathy and insight. These allow one to penetrate patterns of thought that are not your own but have existed in the past or in the present. This gift of empathy that enables this ‘culture travel’ means that one values language, while simultaneously being aware of its limitations. In my final year in charge of a parish, I spent the five weeks of Lent speaking about the ‘real’ meaning of five Biblical words. In every case it look more than a half-hour to tease out the nuances of meaning that were implied in these words. Thinking like an Old Testament writer is not possible for us now, but we can, with a little imagination, penetrate some of the key words that are used to deepen our understanding of what he spoke about.

Binary thinking is the product, not of education, but of ‘anti-education’. Our government and all citizens must see in this kind of crude simplistic thinking something that is deeply abhorrent and ultimately destructive. It destroys not only the well-being of the individual who thinks like this, by making them feel outside the mainstream of society, but also it is a way of thinking that ultimately is responsible for conflict and even violence in the wider society. Let us make it clear. The world is not made up of blacks and whites, but there are a glorious number of grey tones in-between. Let us rejoice in those shades of grey!

The title of this blog post is deliberately provocative as it is quite clear that no book of itself can abuse. It is only when it is in the hands of actual human beings that it can sometimes become the tool of abuse. People who, in various situations, have the conscious or unconscious need to inflict harm on others, will seize any tool available. It may be a weapon, the written word, a spoken insult or sadly, in some situations, the Bible itself. Having said this it is also clear that the Bible in other hands can be a tool of healing, comfort, consolation and hope. The difference between these two, the Bible as an abuser or the Bible as a healer, will depend completely on who is holding it at a particular moment.

I am writing in this particular vein because over the past 48 hours I have become aware of the fact that a number of new readers have found their way to our blog. I thought it would be helpful for them to know what this blog is about. I have been writing blog posts for over a year and it does no harm to state again what the underlying principles of this blog are about. I am a retired priest and writer and I have for a number of years focused my reading and pastoral concern on individuals who have found in the church, not good news, but bad news. They have been battered in various ways, emotionally, psychologically and financially and in some extreme cases have been driven to suicide. Fourteen years I published a book on this theme, entitled Ungodly Fear. The correspondence that this book engendered, showed me that the topic of abuse within churches does not go away. In some ways, I seem to have been ahead of the game as the concept of ’emotional abuse’ seems to be coming under the purview of our law makers. The book was the retelling of the stories of a variety of people abused by the church. I tried to show, not only the individual suffering of each individual, but the context of the abuse, the theological ideas that helped to make it possible. Since that time I have garnered material from a variety of sources, psychoanalytical theory, social psychology as well as theology, to illuminate this whole issue and some of this material has appeared in this blog.

In recent weeks I have been an active participant in the blog entitled victimsofmichaelreid.blogspot. This blog is of great value to my studies because it gives a vivid glimpse into the workings of a cult-like church both in the present and the past. I have said enough about the church in the previous post not to need to repeat my comments I made then. But as I know that some readers of that blog have found their way here, I need to make one or two comments directly to them. As past or present members of that church, you are direct participants of an abusive system. This blog cannot, of course, sort out all the emotional and psychological damage of that church, but it can do one thing. It can encourage you to think with greater clarity about what was actually happening at Peniel over the long passage of time.

Before I make further comments about Bishop Reid and his manipulative ways, I want to focus on a key word that is utilised by Bible preachers in many places. It is a word that is ‘biblical’ but is also sometimes a tool of abuse. The word is ‘obedience’. Of course the Bible speaks about obeying the Lord your God but, along the way, obedience towards God is swung to unquestioning obedience of the church leader. In the minds of the congregation to obey God is the same as obeying the leader. That simple confusion leads to in many situations to outright exploitation of individual members of the congregation. That exploitation can be financial, sexual and at the very least emotional. Michael Reid seems to have squeezed the word ‘obedience’ for all he was worth and those who have followed him as leaders at Trinity are not much better. The way they have done it is also to extract favourable quotes from Scripture about leaders, which appear to demand absolute obedience. ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ is one favourite and another is ‘submit to those set over you’ .

My blog posts do not last more than a thousand words, so I must come to a final point. Looking at Trinity from the outside I see a pattern there which is repeated all over the world in strongly authoritarian churches which practise charismatic type worship. I see a gifted individual (here Michael Reid) who has stumbled on the secrets of crowd manipulation. Whether he is sincere in his beliefs I am unable to judge, but what he was able to do is create for himself a large crowd of adoring followers who used to hang on his every word. This is intoxicating and even addictive for him. The bonus was that he became powerful both socially and financially as well. It was probably inevitable that this power expressed itself in taking advantage of the females of the congregation (as one of the perks of power) but everything ultimately became all about the leader and the few others chosen to share in the perks. What did the congregation get out of this? At its simplest level, the congregation picked up some of the reflected glamour of the gifted man of power. He had a certain amount of star-dust to spread around and people felt honoured when he gave them even a small amount of attention. All through the process of Peniel, (I did visit as part of my research for my book in 1998) there was a gradual strengthening of the ties between leader and led which in fact gave very little to the led. The leader ‘takes all’.

I hope the new readers will feel able to stay with us as we continue to uncover the dynamics of abusive churches. I shall be freely commenting here on the continuing developments at Brentwood, particularly as ‘Gail’, the American Bible school student has helped this blog think about the particular issues of that church. From the tone of this blog post, you will be aware that the Bible is not read uncritically, but is allowed to criticise the claims of those who take abusive power over vulnerable people in the name of God.

As my regular readers will know, today, December 6th, was an important day in the history of one abusive church, Trinity, Brentwood. This is the day when Nigel Davies, the courageous editor of a blog seeking an apology for some grotesque wrongs committed by the church under Michael Reid, the former pastor, met the Trustees face to face. He was allowed some forty minutes to speak to them, giving both spoken and written testimonies about various acts of power abuse that took place when Michael Reid was in charge. The main problem for Nigel and his supporters and fellow sufferers has been that, apart from the removal of MR, the entire staff who participated in the financial and emotional abuse have been allowed to remain in post. They have never admitted to anything, apart from some platitudinous expressions of regret.

As I have explained in a previous post, the incident that led to today’s meeting was a statement by an American Bible School student who was at the church some 30 years ago. She was treated appallingly by the church, culminating in incident of rape by one of the church members. In her recent statement about the incident which was published on Nigel’s blog, she stressed that the real suffering she had had to deal with was as much the humiliating way the Church had treated over the whole 18 months she was in England, as the event of sexual violence. This testimony for the first time spurred the church into action. They contacted the police and the Charity Commissioners because they realised that a rape allegation could not be buried like the other accusations swirling around the church. The victim of the incident has, as I mentioned before, linked up with our blog and no doubt will be reading this update in addition to Nigel’s account on the other blog.

As soon as I read Nigel’s account on his blog this afternoon, I entered a comment on the fact that the Trustees were forbidden to ask of Nigel any questions. This strikes me as a typical lawyer-inspired gesture of defensiveness. I pointed out in my comment that if the Trustees really wanted to engage with the problems of the past and Nigel’s presentation, they would want to reach out to him as a human being by talking to him, not just treating him as the conveyor of a written testimony. This defensiveness seems to be a ploy to try and objectify the problem and deal with it through quasi-legal means, such as denial and forgetfulness. In other words the Trustees are still behaving like a closed group which has no intention of changing unless it has to. In my comment I expressed the hope that the Charity Commissioners would see the testimonies that Nigel had brought along as they will want to see that some changes are being made in the culture of the church, maybe even proper expressions of regret.

Trinity Church Brentwood seems to have confirmed that it is institutionally incapable of doing the correct thing, unless compelled. I am hoping that ‘Gail’ will read this and realise that she too needs to put pressure on the church to engage with her, not just as the writer of a testimony about a crime, but as a human being who has suffered severely. I would suggest that she demands to speak to them by Skype, but she will only address them to their face if they allow proper interaction with her testimony. If they treat her like they have treated Nigel, by forbidding questions and interaction, then she should refuse to speak with them.

Nigel’s meeting with the Trustees today is the latest stage in an ongoing saga. It is important to our blog because it is a live developing example of the kind of behaviour that I have been trying to study and understand over the past twenty years. One particular change over this time is that the law of the land now seems to recognise the existence of emotional abuse. How that will apply to churches like Trinity remains to be seen. It may be that the Charity Commissioners may intervene a little more quickly when the detect a regime in a church which is obviously not conducive to an individual’s psychological and emotional health. As the law has stood, it is only when behaviour extends to actual violence, sexual or otherwise, that the police and courts will intervene. As readers of this blog will know, there are many, many ways of abusing an individual which do not involve actual violence. Abuse can be devastating in a person’s life, as Chris has testified. If the church of Christ cannot recognise abuse when it happens, it is a strange thing that such an institution can claim to have anything to with the teaching of the Gospels.

My previous blog post opened my awareness to a very crucial insight in understanding the dynamics of abuse in church. I mentioned that Christians were often people who were in touch with the child-like qualities of trust and openness. These same qualities are encouraged by Christian teaching and also necessary for developing the attitudes that undergird spirituality and the capacity to worship. In worship we are encouraged to open ourselves in hope towards an unseen heavenly Father. This ability to worship does seem to tap into abilities that we learnt as children, but it is none the worse for that. The problem comes when this capacity to tap into the ‘inner child’ is exploited in some way by another person. If I speak about naivety among Christians, I am not implying that this quality should be deplored. I hope I am simply describing the way that Christian naivety can lead to a state of dangerous vulnerability. The same child-like trust in a heavenly father can easily be transferred into a trust in a manipulative ‘man of God’.

The accounts of sexual exploitation by clergy of children and adult women almost invariably involve what is known as ‘grooming’. I leave to one side the whole issue of child abuse in the church as it is not a subject on which I feel qualified to speak. But the sexual exploitation of women in the church is something that has crossed my radar and I would even go so far as to say that it is relatively common. It occurs right across the board in the church and can happen quite independently of the theology that is preached in a particular church. The case study that I produced in my book, ‘Ungodly Fear’ did in fact concern a Baptist minister. Talking to or corresponding with a number of women who had been abused by clergy, I got used to the idea that part of the grooming technique by the minister or priest was to suggest that ‘God has brought us together’. Another ‘chat-up’ line appears to be the notion that the woman concerned was learning about ‘God’s love’ through the ‘love’ being shown by the exploiting minister. Many of the women concerned, who were caught up in these abusive relationships, were totally unaware of anything being wrong until the ‘affair’ ended. Then, like survivors from a cult, their eyes were opened to being able to see how much they had been taken advantage of and exploited for totally selfish ends. A particular cruel twist that was a feature of some of my accounts, was that the woman herself was blamed for ‘leading the minister astray’. People in the congregation found it too hard to let go of their fantasy of the perfect man of God who was their leader and guru. One abused woman told me that she was blamed for the minister falling sick with cancer. Ostracism and shunning were the order of the day for this wronged woman.

The technique of grooming, whether of a child or an adult, taps into the vulnerability of everyone to want to feel safe in a caring parental relationship. As I suggested in my last blog post, everyone is capable of regressing into a parent-child relationship, particularly in situations of stress. Nobody is ever so totally grown-up that they are allowed to be free from wanting on occasion to return to the safety of a father’s (or mother’s) care. The minister or priest easily provides the archetypal caring figure who can fulfil this role. Every minister has to work on developing a sensitivity to ward off this kind of projection or handle it extremely carefully. The psychoanalysts call the process ‘transference’ and it is very powerful. When such transference become sexualised on either side, the potential for disaster is acute. But one principle is clear. In any pastoral role, the minister has complete responsibility for every aspect of the relationship. Excuses that the relationship was in any way mutual seldom survive any degree of scrutiny. The minister carries all the experience and the responsibility to keep the relationship healthy. Any relationship that becomes sexualised after a woman is seeking some sort of parenting, can only be seen as abusive.

It is quite hard to see how clergy of any denomination actually form lasting relationships when they carry the baggage of being an archetypal figure to many who look to them for help. This task of successfully negotiating other people’s projections and being pastorally effective is a fraught one. All too easily clergy fall into the trap that I have outlined in a previous post. Here we arrive at the issue of narcissism and its capacity to cause havoc in pastoral relationships. In summary it can be stated that any minister who brings to his (or her) ministry unresolved hungers for self-esteem and status is likely to be in considerable danger for the kinds of pastoral disasters that we see from time to time. Sexual acting-out is but one possible manifestation of this ‘needy’ behaviour and, as we described before, the origins of this abusive pattern can nearly always be traced back to childhood.

From all this it can be seen that I consider narcissism to be an ever-present danger for ministers and clergy. Whether it is acted out sexually, in a variety of power games or through financial skull-duggery, it is something that should be monitored throughout their ministry. I would welcome mentoring and monitoring for all clergy, but sadly as previous blogs have indicated, the clergy of the Church of England are extremely reluctant to have any of their actions or decisions questioned or scrutinised.

In my last post, I found that, in my enthusiasm for explaining the dynamics of narcissism, I was taking up too many words for me to describe very much about the pain of religious abuse. This post is to take the discussion on a further stage. The easiest way to start to explain a bit more about what people tell me about the experience of abuse in a religious context, is for us to imagine this scenario. The experience I want us to imagine is that of a child who has parents who constantly humiliate her and never let her stand on her own two feet with words of encouragement and support. From a rational point of view, the right decision might be for that child simply to walk away from the source of harm and find another environment in which to which to try and flourish. In practice, as we all know, this is not possible, because children are biologically and psychologically bound to the individuals who brought them into the world. The bonds that hold children to parents are in fact so strong that they continue inside us all even after the parents have died. When Winnicott said that ‘there is no such thing as a baby’, he was talking about these decisive invisible cords that that tie us, willingly or not, to other people. While most of us eventually physically leave our parents to live a different kind of life within marriage, the ‘ghost’ of both parents continues to live inside us as long as we live.

This enmeshment with others, in this case our parents, is a point of vulnerability for every individual. When the process of bonding with parents has, in fact, been ‘good-enough’, it can help direct us to pursue other relationships of a wholesome and sustaining kind throughout our lives. Nevertheless the tie with our parents is rarely completed without leaving some ragged painful edges. A particular period of vulnerability is the young person going off to college or leaving home in their late teens. One part in him revels in the new independence but another part misses the emotional support that home had provided. As many parents know, the entire teenage period can be a fraught rehearsal for this time of independence and the process is seldom experienced without some pain on both sides. A typical young person living away from home for the first time will oscillate between self-congratulation on being ‘grown-up’ and a sense of home-sickness and feeling abandoned.

It is no coincidence that recruitment to cults and extreme religious groups typically takes place among young people in their late teens and early twenties. I am sure that I have drawn attention to the fact that recruitment to these groups may have a lot to do with the way that this age-group is coping with their sense of bereavement and loss at leaving home. The new group offers to them a sense of family, of belonging and above the opportunity of ‘adopting’ a new parent in the person of a religious leader. It is my observation that countless young people are attracted to religious groups because they have the opportunity to be re-parented by an apparently benign father-figure in the form of the religious leader. There is nothing remotely unusual or even unhealthy about this dynamic in itself. The dynamic, however, can become extremely unhealthy if the leader, himself exploits the relationship or simply has no insight into what can go wrong. We all know about the phenomena of ‘groupies’ who surround pop-stars and are frequently exploited by them. Similar dynamics can be observed in many religious groups, particularly where the leader possesses facets of narcissism which I described in the last post. While sexual exploitation of religious followers may be rare, the dangers of linking young adults who are developmentally vulnerable with narcissistically inclined leaders, is a dangerous mix.

The dynamic that holds a young person in thrall to a religious group, whether a church or a cult, will not normally create emotional distress as long as the young person remains in the group. The biggest danger is that, while they are in the group, the process of emotional development involved in growing up is put on hold. By reverting to the safety of the family unit through the group, the typical cult member will not be working through the emotional task of separating from their family of origin which is part of the preparation for adult independence. Most however eventually emerge from the group and continue with the task of growing up. The worst that can be said of such individuals is that their process of maturity was delayed. Thus they survive unscathed and take their place as mature adults after their period of emotionally ‘treading water’ within some group or other.

A minority of young people are deeply damaged by their passage through a religious group. Some never emerge properly. Their need for attachment has become permanently focused on the leader or guru and his teaching, so that they cannot imagine life without this prop. At an emotional level they have remained a child, totally dependent on the ‘parent’. When this happens, the process of disentangling from these kinds of bonds is never achieved without enormous amounts of pain and emotional distress. The group has created in the follower a dependency on itself every bit as lethal as an addiction to hard drugs. The literature on drugs offers an explanation of the way that dependency is never just physical but it extends to the brain so that addiction is psychological, emotional and mental.

The ‘survivors’ of cultic groups are sometimes deeply distressed damaged people. Their desire to trust others and to attach themselves to an ideal has been ruthlessly taken advantage of or exploited in some way. It would not be untrue to see that religion generally appeals to the child part of our personalities. We could never understand Jesus’ words about faith and trust unless we had learnt these qualities as children. But it is these same ‘child-like’ qualities that are also the key to our vulnerability and open us up to be being exploited in a variety of ways. Those who do in fact exploit this child part of their followers are power abusers of the worst kind. They should remember the words of Jesus about taking advantage of children and the way that millstones were used to place such abusers into the depths of the sea.

It was last summer that I noticed something about my participation in courses and conferences for those abused by faulty religion. It was the fact that, unlike almost all my fellow attendees, I have never had to endure the experience of being abused and humiliated by religious leaders. That seemed to be the experience of everyone else, and it was particularly striking last summer in Washington DC. Participation in the conference almost seemed to require a story of pain, heartbreak and long slow recovery from an abusive situation in the past. Attendance at the conference was indeed, for many, part of this long process of returning to psychological health. Having pointed out this fact that, apart from facing parishioners who believed that they had all the answers to what they thought was wrong with my church, I am largely free of the pain that Chris and many others refer to in their experience of church. Any reader who wants to know more about why I choose to involve myself in this whole area, should consult the pages at the beginning of this blog. They may get some idea how I came to be in this place of wanting to help those who suffer pain because of religious abuse.

There is an argument for believing that I could be more effective in assisting others, who have gone through times of cultic or religious abuse, if I had suffered something similar. But there is also a strong case for saying that my freedom from this particular kind of emotional pain allows me to be clear eyed about the problem. As the followers of my posts will witness, I do understand a bit about the dynamics of religious groups which gives me some insights into these problems. Sufferers of religious or cultic abuse sometimes prefer to hear, not ‘I feel your pain’, but a more detached analysis of how person A. manipulated and plotted to take over a group in order to extract emotional and financial benefit for himself. (It is normally a him!) This objective comprehension of the dynamics of abuse will help some to rise up, even if only temporarily, above the emotional pain and take back a certain level of control. They now understand better why they feel in the way they do. It is my claim that new insight into a problem of a painful nature in your past will normally assist you to deal with it better. Sometimes it even helps to see the perpetrator of some evil against you as themselves a victim. What they did still hurts terribly years later but the insight that can be gained as to why they found it ‘necessary’ to damage others, will ease a little of the emotional pain felt now.

Blog followers will know that I am following closely the events taking place in Brentwood where an abusive church is being pressured to face up to its past. The former leader, Michael Reid, who was sacked (at massive expense) by the Trustees in 2008, continues to haunt the church, partly because no one wants to look back at the appalling history of his abuse. Ostensibly he was removed for an illicit sexual liaison with a church member but there is much more abuse hidden in the church’s history. My interest in the church is partly because I visited it during my research into abusive churches in the 1990s, but also the blog, that is run by one Nigel Davies, continues to throw up fascinating material both from current as well as former members. In my retirement, I cannot access case studies as rich as this for my interest in religious abuse, so this blog and its evolving story grips my attention. I find myself able from time to time able to offer comments and interpretation on-line. One thing that intrigues me, in particular, is that, to all appearances, Michael Reid seems to fulfil all the criteria for being a prototypical narcissistic charismatic leader. Lest this sound as though I am trying to level at Michael Reid an insult of maximum impact, let me say at once that this description from psychoanalytic language is as much about the damage probably done to him at an early age. In other words although the description of ‘narcissist’ sounds like an accusation, it is also a description of someone who may have had much evil visited on them first. Further the fact that a particular narcissist has been allowed to wreak horrendous damage on others, is a criticism of the culture that tolerates this kind of grandiose behaviour, as though it were acceptable. Churches, especially in the States, seem to love the larger-than life personalities that emerge within the charismatic evangelical world, but these places, where these personalities are allowed to lead and run amok, are ones best shut down. So to repeat, the prototypical narcissist like Michael Reid is often a victim of faulty rearing, so that, in adulthood, such an individual has a massive ‘deficit’ of self-esteem. He works hard to experience the self-esteem once denied to him as a child and consequently other people are ruthlessly manipulated to achieve an emotional ‘high’ which may fill a yawning emptiness within him. The literature suggests that, along the way, the narcissist has become less than empathetic to the needs of other people, because his need to be constantly affirmed is massive. Other people are ruthlessly exploited as the targets of his power games. The narcissist may dominate them or demand their slavish adoration, and these behaviours are both stock in trade for the narcissist. It is in noticing this dynamic that can offer an insight into the dysfunction and problems that pervade so many cult-like churches.

The pain of becoming subject to a malign narcissist can be terrible and life-long. The two aspects of the relationship that I have mentioned, demanding from people slavish adoration or subjecting them to abject humiliation, are both incredibly damaging. I realise from my word count that I need to bring this post to a close for now and leave further comments on the subject of the pain of victims for another time. But today I ask my reader to consider the damage that religious leaders can and do create in their followers. There is of course more to be said and I will return to the topic of the pain of abuse in another blog.

The twenty fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was also the anniversary of the collapse of the most extraordinary social and political experiment that the world has ever seen. Marxism/Leninism in and around the Soviet Union was an ideology that believed it had all the answers to the economic and political problems of society. At the same time it put out the idea that it was possible to create a new type of humanity, Soviet man. This great ‘Idea’ that the ultimate victory of socialism was assured and that, whatever the set-backs, nothing could defeat its ultimate victory, was all embracing. In theory it inspired and filled the imaginations of every citizen in the Soviet empire. That it collapsed both as an economic idea and a social movement is a fact of history. It had been sustained through the lies, self-deceit and propaganda of the system. Millions of actual human beings died of starvation because the authorities wanted to promote false statistics of grain production in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Because much of the pretend grain did not exist, people starved. The great ‘Idea’ was in fact a fantasy but it achieved through the propaganda machine a period of apparent success. Meanwhile it never resolved the actual problems of motivating people and allowing them to breathe the fresh air of human individuality and desire for freedom.

The 40 year experiment in changing human nature was only possible because the Soviet authorities seized all the tools of communication within Russia and its satellite states. Having shut off every alternative voice by creating a totally closed society, they were then able, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, ‘to elevate the primitive refusal to compromise into a theoretical principal and regard it as the pinnacle of orthodoxy’. In other words the political elite ‘knew’ what was true, and discussion and debate were to be ruthlessly suppressed. Even before the Revolution of 1917, Lenin had written that his aim in polemics was not to refute but to destroy his opponent. This paranoid ruthless streak which is part of the ‘Idea’ has a kind of fundamentalistic quality not dissimilar to the totalitarian thinkers of the American Right of today. The power of Soviet leaders was rooted in something that rendered it beyond even the possibility of dissent or debate.

Totalitarian ideologies and political systems exist because there is always a part of human nature that wants a strong individual to make decisions on its behalf. The political success of Putin in Russia is of surprise to us in the West because we cannot imagine how anyone would want to follow a totalitarian leader who uses the lies and the old propaganda tools of the old Soviet empire. Otherwise intelligent people can also be duped in believing this take on history and society. As a 12 year old I listened as the ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury spoke about his visit to Russia for the 40th anniversary of the Revolution in 1957. Thankfully we were also being exposed to another version of contemporary history, so there was little chance of the corruption of young minds. Social justice was an honourable aim for any society but this high ideal blinded many to the truth of what was actually going on in Soviet society. Nevertheless the admirers of the Soviet system in their blindness to actual facts, were in the words of one commentator, ‘traitors to the human mind, to thought itself’.

What point do I want to make about totalitarianism and the church? First I want to acknowledge that similar patterns of coercive and ‘infallible’ thinking have existed throughout the history of the church. I need just to mention the shame of the period of the Inquisition and the cruelties of the Reformation on both sides. But having admitted to the way that Christians have behaved in the past, it is deeply shameful that totalistic systems of thought still exist in the Church today. It is one thing to take sides in a religious war back in the 16th century and kill others in the name of God, but quite another to support an ideology today which cannot tolerate dissent or disagreement. Christians, thankfully, do not kill each other but the language of contempt and vilification of their ideological opponents is fairly vicious at times. Any system that cannot tolerate debate or discussion is in danger, like the ‘Idea’ of Marxist/Leninism, of becoming a system that destroys and tramples human beings under foot. The stand that this blog is taking, is saying is simply this. When a belief system cannot defend itself by reasoned argument and politeness, it is in danger of becoming totalitarian. Such a system must be resisted because, otherwise, it will go on to destroy people, if not physically, at least emotionally and spiritually. Sadly we meet today many such systems within the Christian church itself.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called on Anglicans to ‘disagree well’ in the debates that divide Anglicans. However a recent survey indicates that so far from disagreeing well, the majority of male Anglican evangelical clergy believe that separation is a better option than tolerating disagreements in the Communion. They would also prefer that agreement would somehow be insisted on by a central authority. Their support for such a (papal?) pronouncement would, of course, depend on it conforming to their pre-existing convictions.

It is important to unpack what is being said on both sides in this debate. The Archbishop with his elegant phrase, ‘disagree well’, captures a gracious ability to live with people who do not agree with you or who use a different set of concepts and language to talk about God or moral issues. The ability to allow for a different narrative about such things alongside your own, is not difficult for the inclusive Christian. They will have a strong awareness that their own position is never the last word. The liberal inclusive thinker will also recognise, as this blog has emphasised many times, that words themselves are sometimes unhelpful in the task of describing truth.

The contrasting position, which has been revealed in a recent Yougov poll organised by the Westminster Faith Debates, reveals that two thirds (68%) of male evangelical clergy have no sympathy with the idea that the Anglican Church as a whole should embrace diverse ideas. A smaller number (61%) of evangelical women clergy would also take this line. For both groups, the idea of propositional truth trumps any idea of the possibility of ‘disagreeing well’ with those who do not follow the ‘correct’ line, whether it be on moral issues or on doctrine. From this perspective, truth, as presented in doctrinal statements or in the words of Scripture, cannot be changed or compromised. God’s will has been revealed in words and any attempt to change these words and propositions will be firmly resisted.

Overall the Yougov poll shows that most clergy approached support Archbishop Welby with his call for the church to ‘disagree well.’ 75% would back this appeal. But the problem of a fixed determined intransigence among a certain proportion of the clergy seems to be not easily resolved. As I have said recently on this blog, the reason for this failure to agree or to tolerate difference is unlikely to be completely theological but rather to tap into other aspects of personality and psychology. This blog continues to explore what these non-theological factors might be. But whether this intransigence comes from an individual psychology or a tribal mentality, it continues to be an institutional nightmare for our leaders in the church. The days of absolute episcopal power seem to be over as lay people, who pay for the church, begin to flex their institutional muscles. These same lay people will listen, not to a remote bishop, but to the clergyman at hand. If he defies the local bishop, then they will support him, when necessary, by withholding the Parish Share. A financial famine is the one thing that could cause the whole Anglican structure to collapse. It appears to be quite close in certain Dioceses in the North of England and in the Diocese of Truro.

The ability to ‘disagree well’ is something that I, as the editor of this blog, can firmly endorse. The problem is, however, not what I, as an individual, think but whether the church as a whole allows its intransigent minority to become more and more dominant. This year, according to the poll, those who cannot and will not shift from a fixed position numbers 25%. In five years time, what will that total be? This blog has its aim the desire to suggest that the tsunami of conservative thinking in the church should be challenged and if possible checked. Resisting intransigent thinking, even in a very tiny way, is a worthy activity, not only because it stands up for truth of a generous and inclusive kind, but also because truth of this type is less likely to cause pain and suffering to those who encounter it. Truth and compassion are two very good reasons for welcoming the Archbishop’s call on all of us to ‘disagree well’.